nice demo. a bit dark for me and the middle part is very slow on my GF2 making the sound crispy. the music is nice, i don't hear a problem with the guitar, the solos are cools. It changes from pseudo experimental boring things.

Wow, it rocks !
It runs very well, even with a geforce 2, the design and the overall graphic ambience are in one of the current demoscene "tendance" (read: splines, and rendering-to-texture blending effects), all very well made (it's rare). Good job guys, I hope you'll get a nice rank.

Total demo, I have saw a thousand demos but while watching this my mouth stayed wide open..Outstanding graphic and transitions, total soundtrack by Amusic, (better than his superb track in EoF)...One of the best demos I have ever seen

Heh zafo, we all bitched at you for your "preliminary" ranking... who could've guess that you're a psychic... well navi's comment on the big screen says it all.. "See you next year"... that's a call for duty! Thank you for everything.

whoah whoah whoah... I had to watch this demo twice, because the first time I was so damn fucking impressed by the music that I paid no attention to the demo... I only listened to this fabulous music.
Second time I watched the demo, and found it really excellent.
This is definitely a big hit, imho, I purely love it, congrats dudez

I'm a big fan of ASD, they have a very unique style where they the screen is always filled by a lot of different effects. As always, impressive transition work. Their music is always 'different'. It's not the prod i've liked most from them, but this one is very good. Keep up the good work

The thing that struck me in the compo was that this demo seemed running extremly smoothly, and it wasn't just the fps, this demo really flowed. It seemed to suffer from a bad case of coder design tho. Can't choose between rulez/ok before seeing it again.

ASD are back with their most mature production so far. Building on top of their traditional quality of blending spectacular effects with transitions, producing a unique experience that few other groups can achieve , they added a more consistent color scheme and a musical score which mixes several known styles into one quite original sound. The result is awesome, a five minute trip that indeed can only be described as a dream.

This should've ranked higher. The design, art, music, and pacing on this demo are extremely tight. The effects are highly stylized and original, and the colors, like Edge of Forever, are beautiful. While I can't recall a specific visual in this demo that burns itself into your brain (like the fish with the glowing eyes or the hand of God in EoF), the presentation is extremely consistent, impressive, and most of all, doesn't drag on and bore you. Excellent work.

I watched it again in home a lot of times and I want to write some comments now. What I don't like is the overused blending, so that I can't recognize what is running on in the screen at some parts. Edge of Forever had much more admirable parts to remember. In this demo my favorite ones are at the beginning with the distorted face, but mostly with the head, revealing a bright light and the eclipse, exploding to the great crystalized tunnels! But no more. The music made me love this demo and it's full of emotion, used and this presented very well in the demo. However, it will be my favorite ASD demo now.

Zafo, the demo has been presented to asm03 as it is *WITH* the guitar. A non guitar version of the tune only will be relased if and *ONLY IF* ASD as well as I feel like releasing such a thing. We (ASD) have discussed this issue on the very same day that the demo was released, and agreed against releasing the non-guitar tune. If we ever release it you as well as everyone else will be informed from ASD on this thread.

The most powerful demo in the compo for sure. It resembles VIP2, one of my all time favorites, in many ways. Though, the spooky voice gives me the shiver. What is he saying? I'd like to do a demo like this some day, without the spooky voice though. ;-)
Anyways great demo, a favorite from Asm'03.

I believe that this demo should stay as it is for ever and ever.
If anyone except ASD dare to change even a pixel of this demo he should get punished.
It's like the apocalypse...Not even a comma is changed for centuries.

I'm not a product of your dreams,
I'm not either injected into your fantasy
by some conspiracy or diabolic plot.
I was, I am and I will be
a part of your crystalite world.
Omnipresent, spreading my roots
deep into your nightmares.
I cannot be removed.
I am just there.
Because I am, none other..
than you!

I am You Female Vocals (Lisa):

You are a dream.
You are the whispering twilight,
shining into my world of illusion.
You are the warmth of my mortality,
A moment in time.
You seek after me.
You are forgetfulness,
but you are forgiveness also.
You are the child I wish I had been,
the innocence I could never recapture.
You wish to embrace me.
You are but the candle's flicker,
yet you can set my heart ablaze.
You cried for me,
yet not one tear has reached me.
You need not despair.
You'll be there still for me to long for.
For you to be reflected,
into the stare of my loving eyes.
For you to be dreamt of.
For you..
am I.

My biggest problem with the guitar is that it sounds so.... hobby. A sort of boy room-ish and cramped sound, apart from the rest of the music which sounds crisp and "wide". More work should've gone into making the guitar sound more "united" with the music.

ilm's comment about the guitar is the only constructive criticism I've heard so far, and that's something I'll definately pay close attention in my next guitar co-op tune with Leviathan. The "boy room-ish" comment almost made me fell off my chair.. yes indeed it was recorded in a boy room =)

first; the music-replayer must be buggy because it jumps and clicks throughout the demo.. but let's put that aside. the übercheezy pitched-down-speech in the beginning was so lame i almost pressed esc right there and then. :) the rest of the music is not bad and the guitar wasn't that bad. regarding the visuals - is render-to-texture just an excuse to make dirty and ugly blue things nowadays? it's. not. pretty. the effects themselves were good, just too bad that shoddy camerawork never really let's us see them. all around it was way too blue and it didn't seem very well planned.

I guess MRI is right after all.. if my voice can pass as pitched-down, then I am spooky and give people the shivers. Actually the voice is pitched-up a bit as at some point the tune went through a 5 percent speed increase. As for the music-replayer.. I don't think anyone ever complained about fmod before.. there must be something wicked with your configuration.

you've never heard of anyone having complaints about fmod before? wow, that's a first. :) well, your demo is the only one i've seen the last.. two years or so, that stutter like that, so i doubt it's my fault. :) ..and your voice; thanks for not pitching it down (that blows) but it still sounds lame.

gloom, what is your configuration? It is a ripe possibility that your pc is not powerful enough to render the graphics on time, and this drags the sound along with it. Of course something else might also be going on. I do not know how fmod works since I'm not a coder myself, so i guess navis would be the right person to make accurate assumptions. On my config (athlon 900 / Gffx5600) the demo runs smoothly with no stuttering at all (either video or audio). Ah, the music is compressed using ogg vorbis. Try to play the music by itself and see if it suffers from stuttering that way.

Rasmus, the fact that it can be plugged in the codebase in like 5-10 minutes and that it can replay .ogg as well as that it saves precious time in the development are indeed the reasons we chose fmod as the sound replayer. =) But if we are to talk about fmod we should open a bbs thread. I'd much more prefer to see comments on the demo on this thread =)

I will use fmod. The reason is because all my friends in the greek scene used it and recomended, so I can do the shame and ask for help if I want and I'll be able to play music in even less than 5 minutes :)

But why is it bad? I'd like to know..
I have personally heard it's very fast and supports many formats.

regarding fmod: I have heard complains about both prods I released with fmod about clicking sound, although my 2 computers always runed them (and dreamchild of course) without any problems at all.
However even if we assume that the clicking problem lies with fmod (which I doubt) just the fact that it's so damn easy to use and well designed is enough reason for me to continue using it. In fact it must be the only library that I use without even considering wrapping it with my own interface and that says a lot.
People should look to fmod as an example before designing library interfaces and APIs

I have Amd 2100+ with 512MB RAM and GeForce 4MX 440(By Creative).
I watched "DreamChild" over 10 times
and because of my GeForce weakness it get's slow in the tunnel scene but the rest of the demo is quite good.

Sweetness! But... was that a Poser head my eye spied? ;) Anyway, the fx and scenes are very nice, and the music was a very cool rock opera ballad style thing. But somehow (and this is my opinion) the vocals didn't mix too well into the music... It didn't have the same mastering as, say, a 'Fall Equals Winter', or 'Elements'. Well, thumb up anyway.

A few parts felt slightly flat, like they might have benefitted from being in a different sequence... or maybe the music needed a little more bass here and there... Still I like it enough to comment... definitely worth seeing. :)

This is one of the deepest and most beautiful productions I have seen. I remember being impressed when I saw it over the Assembly 2003 web broadcast. Now that I have a video card that can run it at a decent FPS, I am totally blown away. Nice work!

The music! Amusic is a genius! The strings worked so well, and later on the guitar managed to synch to the classical part very well.
The visuals also managed to hold the rest of it together, in particular around the eclipse scene.

Dreamchild has been nominated for the best soundtrack award in the scene awards 2004. Leviathan and I will probably be at Breakpoint for the ceremony so if anyone of you is going to be there as well, drop an e-mail =)

I especially liked the guitar, but as others have pointed out, it sounds as if it is not affected by the same hall effect that the other instruments are. I also think the female voice should be more disorted, like being pitch shifted upwards about two-three semitones.

Nevertheless, the music is one of best I ever heard in a demo.
And the visuals are also very good, which makes this simply a great demo!

Adding a bit to the "behind the scenes" of Dreamchild, the female Voice was recorded with a crappy SB microphone with loads of clicks, plosives and cpu-fan noise. The recording took place in the UK and I got a set of several takes in .mp3 format.

I really went through hell and back to remove all extra noises, and make the waves sound decent.

Oh yes.. I am you.ogg has travelled the world to become what it is =)

(Hey Lisa, if you ever read this, thank you for your great voiceovers)

ASD continues to amaze. I have to agree with the others, though -- there are a few parts in this that just don't work well (IMHO the first "letters" part, the tunnel part and perhaps the greetings part) and destroy some of the overall fluidness. Still, I love the style and the smooth transitions between everything :-)

music doesnt sound like nightwish. not at all cheesy lyrics, but transitions (how scene changes) ... one word: wow. somehow this demo seems too blurred sometimes and also lots of glowing. but its not bad demo, i think its worth of thumb, i dont have no crits except lyrics and maybe that one picture with ladies in beginning should be removed.

Great demo, great soundtrack. I need to re-watch(is there such word in english?;) ) all Assmebly 2003 to understad why this demo isn't number 1.
Please DO NOT dear to remove guitars in Your future productions;)

One of the best things about the BASS concert 2006 - one of the 87 million great things - was the joy on Leviathan and Amusics' faces during the song. Also, Amusic saved me from having to do the last bit of lyrics which ... yeah that wasn't gonna happen (:

Delicious! Not ASD's best but I love their style. A bit incoherent at places but that's what you get. Regarding the guitar, a bit can be done on the production but I'm impressed by aMUSIC's instrumental skills (or whoever played the guitar). I love the lyrics and everything. Thumbs up!